4cms x 3cms A monochrome portrait miniature of a lady in a head veil set in a gilt frame originally a bracelet but adapted to wear as a pendant at the neck. Signed IB, dated 1772.

John Bogle famous miniaturist with examples in V&A London was the son of a Scottish excise officer. In the 1760s he trained at the Foulis Academy in Glasgow.

In 1770 he moved to London where he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, returning to Edinburgh in 1800. A brilliant portrait miniaturist, a contemporary wrote of him: 'He excelled in small likenesses, was a little lame man, very proud, very poor and very singular'.

This tiny monochrome portrait was originally made to be worn on a woman's bracelet. And that matters. This is a portrait of a woman, for a woman. Not necessarily a lover's image or a man's possession, but one woman choosing to keep the image of another woman physically close to her. Worn at the wrist, the portrait would have been seen repeatedly throughout the day — perhaps far more intimately than a miniature suspended as a pendant. Bogle gives us a woman of maturity and presence: the billowing white of her cap and shawl, the extraordinarily delicate stippling, and above all that beautiful, languid, contemplative gaze. For me, this little object marks something important in portraiture: an image can speak not only about the person portrayed, but about the relationship between women, and about who was doing the looking.  See my film of this piece  https://youtube.com/shorts/VJ7v_fkc4u0?feature=share

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